Cultural Trauma and Methodological Challenges in Polish Art History

After the Wall: Cultural Trauma and Methodological Challenges in Polish Art History Irena Kossowska Nicolaus Copernicus University, Torun Institute of Art, Polish Academy of Sciences, Warsaw, Poland An exhibition that concluded the first decade of the new geopolitical order in post-1989 Europe, a show entitled After the Wall: Art and Culture in Post-Communist Europe, curated by Bojana Pejić, David Elliot, and Iris Müller-Westermann at the Stockholm Moderna Museet in 1999, is the source of the title of this paper. The complexities and intricacies of the cultural transition in the former satellite countries of the Soviet Union have been also explored by Piotr Sztompka, a Polish sociologist who employed the term “cultural trauma” to analyze the condition of Polish society after the collapse of the Berlin Wall. It would be a commonplace to say that the 1989 turning point was culturally beneficial for the post-Communist countries, and yet, Sztompka argues that the aftermath period brought a belated aftershock to the social and cultural tissue. “There cannot be any doubt that the collapse of Communism was a traumatogenic change par excellence,” Sztompka assures us, naming the social disorder the “trauma of victory.”1 He claims that the traumatizing process was due to the confrontation of two opposing cultures, i.e., the remnants of socialism and the consumerism of a predatory capitalism. As he explains, “Even when the spreading of alien culture is. .peaceful, by virtue of economic strength, technological superiority or the psychological attractiveness of cultural products, flowing from the core toward the periphery, the result is often the break of cultural stability, continuity, and identity of indigenous groups, a milder and yet resented form of cultural trauma.”2 Hence the process of liberation, emancipation, and absorption of the Western type of globalization of society encapsulated a sense of cultural uncertainty and an inferiority 1 complex, and as such it affected the transformation of the domestic humanities, art history among others. The instant embrace and enthusiastic employment of feminism, psychoanalysis, neo-Marxism, hermeneutics, phenomenology, poststructuralism, deconstruction, and the “pictorial turn,” to mention just a few methodological models adopted from Western linguistics, anthropology, and philosophy, were accompanied by an acute critique of the domestic legacy of the discipline. The eagerness to catch up with Western idioms of theorizing historiography and the radical impetus to embark on a modernized track of research entailed a sharp revision of previously produced knowledge, the reevaluation being labelled as “polemical art history.” Actually, Polish post-1956 art history was neither simply factual nor narrowly nationalistic and retrograde (the French, Italian, German, and Russian connections were always meaningful). Hence the imitative implementation of Western methods in local art phenomena (in several cases implying a disregard for the idiosyncratic features of the researched material) appeared to be a kind of a self-blaming strategy and a symptom of what Alexander Kiossev described as a “self-colonization” attitude. “Self-colonizing cultures import alien values and models of civilization by themselves and . they lovingly colonize their own authenticity through foreign models,” claims Kiossev.3 A counterbalance to this tendency was provided by Piotr Piotrowski. Following Norman Bryson and Jonathan Culler, Piotrowski relied on “ramification” or contextualization of art phenomena in relation to the local cultural environment as a primary interpretative tool. In the framework of a new art geography, he conceived a theory of “horizontal art history” which conceptualizes the West as a region of historical importance equal to that of many other parts of the world, yet the most expansive one.4 Piotrowski aimed at deprioritizing Western art centers and at erasing the duality of the center-periphery relationship, ipso facto leveling the 2 hierarchical arrangement of cultures that depreciates the margins and giving primacy to the pluralism of cultural narratives. Piotrowski postulated a deconstruction of Western cultural impact and an analysis of nonhierarchical functional terms, aiming to explain the local specificity and the process of hybridization of Western models and of producing some distinctive artistic amalgams. He also emphasized the necessity of recognition of local canons and axiological systems, and finally, he called for negotiation of diverse modern art formulae by comparing them. As a result, the “vertical” Euro-Atlantic model of art historiography should be replaced by a “horizontal” polyphonic art-historical discourse. How does one rewrite art history in Eastern Europe, though, without constructing another “grand narrative,” as postulated by Piotrowski? How does one inscribe the region into the transnational perspective while analyzing particular cultural identities? Establishing a methodology adequate for inserting East European art production into cross-cultural trends was the key question at the international conference titled East European Art Seen from Global Perspectives: Past and Present, which was organized by Piotrowski in Lublin in 2014. What triggered the polemic was whether the revised historiographic paradigm should be based on comparing regional art canons or on tracing the mobility of artists and the circulation of visual motifs throughout the continents. Beáta Hock from the Leipzig Center for the History and Culture of East-Central Europe, for instance, outlined a program for constructing minor narratives focused on synchronous interconnections and exchange among artists active in the region. Such a dynamic model might prove instrumental in filling in numerous blank spots, extensive gaps, and untreated areas of art historiography. On the other hand, Hock’s proposal exemplifies a typically postmodernist attitude characterized by denial of the “master 3 discourse” and by prioritizing the “small” and the “soft.”5 The Lublin debate remained inconclusive, and equally unsettled seems to be the discussion about the relevance of postcolonial studies to the research of post-Communist cultures. Owing to chronological synchronization, Piotrowski saw an alternative path to the postcolonial critique, namely a posttotalitarian paradigm convergent with the South African postapartheid and the South American postauthoritarian perspective. Yet, regarding the basic differences between the political and geocultural characteristics of those regions his standpoint aroused a substantial controversy. Another controversial issue in Polish post-Wall art history is how to delineate the historically unstable frontiers of the Eastern region of the Continent. After disestablishing the binary political system of the East-West, which thrived on the Continent till 1989, the question of what to call the region has been raised multiple times; should it be referred to as Central Europe, Eastern Europe, or East-Central Europe? In order to pinpoint the historical fluctuations of concepts referring to the Eastern borders of Europe, it is worth recalling that the term “Central Europe” originally denoted the multinational and multiethnical Austro-Hungarian Empire, as well as a group of countries constituted as a result of the empire’s decline, which came along with the fall of the houses of the Hohenzollerns, Romanovs, and Ottomans.6 The literature began to be a site of new connotations of the term “Mitteleuropa,”7 first having a negative load, as it was the slogan of the expansionist pan-German ideology initiated in 1915 by Friedrich Naumann. The dispute over the signifieds of “Central Europe” has turned out to be a long-lasting phenomenon, and, so far, it seems to remain unresolved. Timothy Garton Ash, in his book The Uses of Adversity: Essays on the Fate of Central Europe, has listed as many as sixteen definitions of this region.8 4 As far as the conceptual category of “Eastern Europe” is concerned, as Larry Wolff has proven in his book Inventing Eastern Europe, the term has connoted, first and foremost, a political-economic construct of the Eastern bloc, embracing the satellite countries of the former Soviet Union. 9 It is the Enlightenment ideology of the concept of the exotic East, situated far off the heart of Europe— that is, the West— that Wolff has perceived as the reason for the ultimate annihilation of Central European identity (self-recognition of Western Europe required an antithesis in the form of the East). Defining the category of “East-Central Europe” seems even a greater challenge. Both the contour of this part of the Continent as well as the sociopolitical signified of this term have been subject to change, depending on the historical conditions and research aims.10 In the discourse of some scholars, the term “East-Central Europe” refers to the unrealized geopolitical conception of Intermarium, proclaimed by Józef Piłsudski: a plan for sustaining the security and position of new nation-states constituted after World War I in opposition to the imperial ambitions of Germany and Soviet Russia. Demarcated with the coastline of the Baltic Sea, the Adriatic Sea, and the Black Sea, the area was supposed to encompass Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Belarus, Ukraine, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania, and Yugoslavia. Yet another point of reference for delineating the borders of East-Central Europe can be found in the contemporary literature on the theory of regional development, in accordance with

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